From time to time I have conversations that remind me of the principles that guide my own work in different aspects of facilitation and engagement. Today, in two different design conversations, I was reminded of these again, and I took a few notes as we were talking. These aren’t the be-all and end-all of good practice, but they are things that roll off the tongue and are basic heuristics for how I structure and facilitate public engagement sessions.
- Ask constructive questions. One of my pet peeves is when folks want to structure a public engagement with a presentation of a half- or well-formed policy proposal and ask “What are we missing?” In most cases once a piece of legislation or a plan reaches the consultation stage, the decision is already made that we are going in THIS basic direction. The “What is missing?” can imply that there is room to throw the whole thing out, or it invites ideological contributions that can derail the conversation. Instead, share material and then ask “what would make this stronger?” or “What would make this fail if we didn’t’t address it now?”
- Foster participant ownership: Real transparency can demand of us that we ask participants to share information with us in their own words, in their own handwriting, and in their own voice. As much as possible, have your participants shape their own input, and make sense of it together. The extent to which you are coding data, making summaries, and writing reports and responses alone and outside of the group’s work, is the extent to which they are being left out of the process. So think very consciously about that.
- Ask authentically curious and open-ended questions: in North American culture we have a pre-disposition to asking yes/no questions. We can often appear very curious in doing so, but a question that leaves only two or three possible answers doesn’t actually allow a person to fill it with their wisdom. A simple example is something like “Do you think this proposal will work?” questions that start with verbs and ending question marks usually logically invite a yes or no answer. So practice crafting a question that allows for thoughtful reflection, and provides answers that you cannot yet see such as “how can you see this proposal working?” or “what is your reaction to what we just shared?” Also, avoid questions like “do you think we should go with this proposal or something different?” which still invites a binary choice even though people may choose to answer it with more detail. If you require a follow up question to make a person’s answer more clear, then ask that question in the first place.
- Clarify how responses are to be used: There is nothing worse than being invited to a public consultation meeting only to have your ideas dismissed or ignored. Perhaps the only thing worse is being invited to a process where you believe you are helping to make a decision when in reality the decision is being made elsewhere. I call this “engagement washing.” It’s so important to frame public meetings so that participants are clear about what is happening and what is not happening so that they can make an informed choice to participate and how to participate.
- Facilitate difference, not consensus: Most public engagements are not decision-making processes. Many times in my career I have had to hold decision-makers accountable for making decisions and not outsourcing them by saying “the community needs to agree on this before we implement it.” The role of the community is to be a difficult, diverse, conflicted, heterogeneous, mass of opinions and ideas. Decision makers are elected to make decisions in that context. When facilitating public engagement, I tell my clients that our job will be surfacing differences and not arriving at consensus. Illuminating differences helps decision-maker make good strategic choices and helps them to understand the costs and impact of their decisions.
- PAvoid the tyranny of inclusion. Many engagement processes suffer from what I call the tyranny of inclusion. This operates when we believe we need to respond to every single comment and piece of advice equally. Practically speaking, that requires us to respond to a focus group or expert panel in the same way as we might respond to an anonymous troll who left a comment in passing on a survey form or in a social media thread. When structuring engagement processes, I usually shape circles of engagement that make it clear that the more responsibility you have for the outcome. The tighter the feedback loop for your advice. This principal goes hand-in-hand with design principles of equity of voice and inclusion of different lived expertise in engagement and decision-making, and there is no perfect balance.
- Engagement practice can sustain or undermine democracy: in the courses I teach on engagement I stress this point constantly: how we engage affects people’s feelings and trust of democratic processes. Engagement processes that are restrained, restrictive, or opaque signal and unwillingness to engage with the messy realities of community and citizen. Open, validating and meaningful engagement that can help shape public policy. Decisions helps build, and strengthen democratic participation. This should go without saying, but seeking efficiencies in engagement processes can have the effect of smoothing over all the tricky bits that make democracy and participatory life rich, creative, and co-owned. So be conscious about the choices you make when structuring engagement.
So those are a few. There are many more besides these, not to mention rigorous thinking about power. But these are among the most important ones to begin with for me.
The set up for the weekly staff meeting at the Alaska Humanities Forum offices in Anchorage.
We spent the day yesterday with our colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) preparing for the Art of Hosting that begins this morning. AKHF is an organization that has long embraced the Art of Hosting as a way of operating both their internal organizational functions and their relationship and gatherings with their partners and programs. All over the world there are organizations like this, not always obvious or seen by the global Art of Hosting community, because they labour away on their own work. But until the pandemic every staff member of this organization was sent south for an Art of Hosting once they were hired on. It has been six years since that happened so we are here to partly fulfill that need and to work with several of their partners.
What’s great about this is Kameron Perez-Verdia is on our team. As President and CEO of the organization, he is embodies the practices of participatory leadership which he first learned at a Shambala Institute Authentic Leadership in Action workshop back in 2008 with Toke, Monica and myself. Kameron was raised in the whaling village of Utqiagvik, which is the most northerly point in Alaska. We talked a lot yesterday about the kinds of community gatherings that take place there when the whale hunting crews bring in humpbacks for the community. We talked about the importance of presences and check ins in meetings and how that grounded start to important work is a critical aspect of every part of day to day life, from whaling to a staff meeting in Anchorage.
Kameron and I were talking about the balance between chaos and order yesterday as we were exploring how we could teach the four-fold practice together and he shared with me a term that Yupik elders had taught him about dynamic balance: Yuluni pitallkeqtuglluni, which translates roughly as “just enough to live a good life.” It refers to the amount of connection that we need in a gathering or community, or the amount of structure in a meeting or a process to bring about a feeling of family (tuglluni means family) but allows for agency. We talked about “balance” which in the Yupik world is not a stable equilibrium between two competing forces, but a dynamic, constantly sensed state that is reposnsive to the context.
Perhaps this will be come a theme of our work in the next three days, but it’s a helpful way to contextualize the practices of the Art of Hosting: presence, participation, hosting and co-creating. Each of these are context dependant, which is why they are practices. Bringing just enough to live a good life is the art that implicit in the name of the practice “Art of Hosting.” While many folks seek a stable, always applicable tool or way of doing things, the art of hosting or participatory leadership is about the application of a world of practice to an ever changing context. In being sensitive to what is needed, and how to do it depending on conditions, we constantly create the right balancing moment between too much and not enough, just enough to live a good life.
We start in 2 hours.
Confirmed yet again that the way to build community, and indeed strengthen participatory and democratic societies is to do work together.
Peter Levine, who I feel like everyone should read, has a nice little blog post today that serves as a bit of a gateway to his own research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s his basic thesis:
People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.
A few times this past year I have been in situations that have borne out this reality, for better or worse. For example working with folks in different places on the opioid crisis, for example, it is clear to me that folks can come together across all kinds of ideological differences if there is actual work in the centre to do. Grappling with the realities of governance, community building, the provision of services and policy making is edifying work. It’s hard, and requires relationship and commitment. Everyone has opinions about things, but rolling your sleeves up and getting to work is where relationships and therefore community is built.
It has been true for a while, but community engagement – the traditional “ask the people what they think” kind – is now clearly a dead end way to make things happen. Polling drives policy and as a result you get truly stupid decisions that don’t at all improve life for people but rather just keep the voters electing populists to power. Simplify problems, seed the population with simple platitudes and memes, convince them that “your guy” has the answers and then poll them on the results.
Trust in democratic institutions, a key theme of Peter’s work, is undermined by this approach to community. People don’t believe polls (except the analytics folks working for parties that shape narrative as keenly as marketers working with personalized market segmentations – see what I mean?) and people don;t believe in surveys either. A recent survey in my home community of 5000 people had 250 returns, to which a suspicious refrain of Facebook amongst folks with zero statsitics backgrounds was “That’s all? How can they make decisions based on such a paltry sample.”
The exercise of engagement is often window dressing. It can result in hundreds and hundreds of text answers on qualitative surveys that have no rhyme nor reason to them. Comments like “fix the potholes on Elm Street” don’t mean anything without context, even if a bunch of people say them. And worse still when you ask people how to make the neighbourhood safer, you will be stuck with all manner of opinion and regurgitated talking points fed to folks who know nothing about sociology, criminology, policing or urban design. The value of the content is nil. The value of the exercise is “we consulted with the community and decided to fix the pot holes on Elm Street as a way of solving the problem of community safety.” And so leaders do what they want.
Election success now is about saying you will do a thing, then doing something and successfully externalizing all the bits that didn’t work so you can take credit for the small thing you did. If people buy what you are selling, you will get re-elected. It’s easier just to say vacuous things like “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes and Bring it on Home” over and over and over and over again until people get so sick of you that they elect you to office just to shut you up. From there, you meet the realities of governing, and memes and slogans won;t get you through.
But there are ways out of this state of affairs. On the decision-making side I think we should be investing heavily in citizen assemblies, such as the one currently underway in Saanich and Victoria which is exploring how to merge two cities. These bodies, in which citizens are chosen at random and enter into a learning journey together to understand the issues at play and recommend courses of action. My friend and colleague Aftab Erfan has recently written about the results and potential of citizen assemblies to do proper engagement which honours democratic and participatory principles and generates meaningful accountability for elected leaders in using their power.
And, back to Peter Levine’s work, I believe there is a tremendous potential in the approach of shared work that he advocates above. Some of the most engaging work I have done has included Participatory Narrative Inquiry approaches, which help people gather, listen to and make sense of each other’s stories as they seek openings and affordances for taking action on complex topics. The process itself builds the social connectivity that builds the basis for collaboration and community. It complexities the work of building things like justice (which Peter has a lot to say on) and helps us to understand that there is no single authority that can deliver the perfect outcome in a society.
Democratic societies thrive where there are democratic institutions that help stabilize the conditions that create freedom and diversity of association, participation and contribution. We are entering a period of dire outlook for this kind of rich ecosystem of collaboration. Get out there and make things together with others.
if you are a non-profit/social services leader in BC, then we would love to have you at a free workshop we’re offering in the new year! It’s about using complexity practices to prepare for and navigate crisis and disruption in our organizations and communities. You can learn more and register at this link.
This work has its roots all the way back in 2020 when Ciaran and I ran a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project for a group of organizations serving people with disabilities about how folks were coping during the early days of the pandemic. We learned a lot from that project it still feels relevant and necessary five years later. This work is being supported by our non-profit partners who want to see more resources and support available to leaders in this sector to find paths through the turbulence of crisis, no matter where it comes from. We’ve created a mini-guide which uses Cynefin as a decision making framework for working in crisis. The mini0guide is available to everyone, and we’re hosting two afternoon workshops in January and February next year (more if there’s interest!) aimed at non-profit leaders in BC to provide a more hands-on introduction to the content and explore practical application together.
Our goal is to build community and provide meaningful, practical, accessible tools that bridge the gap between theory and practice. The workshop is free, but space is limited. If you can’t make those dates/times, click this form where you can sign up for updates about future offerings and future versions of the guide as well. Feel free to comment here with any questions.
Please share this invitation!
Back in 2015, Caitlin, Tim Merry, Tuesday Rivera, and I were travelling around the world offering a workshop called “Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics,” in which the four of us were sharing our extensions of work that we had developed emerging out of the common root of the Art of Hosting community and our practices. It was a rich experiment, and we met really interesting folks in Canada, the US and the UK. It started some longer-term partnerships and friendships, and from time to time, I ran into folks who were at those workshops.
I met one of them last week again. Dr. Nomusa Mngoma is a health researcher at Queen’s University, where I was last Monday delivering a day-long workshop on the Art of Hosting basics for the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change. Nomusa saw the invitation and showed up. When I met her, I had a vague recollection of meeting her previously, but I couldn’t place it. We both thought for a while, and of course, it was at our Beyond the Basics retreat in Kingston in 2015, the last time I had taught in that city.
We caught up and went through the day, and as we were leaving, Nomusa handed me her business card, which wasn’t for her job at Queen’s. It was as the owner and instructor of Dansani Dance Company, a local business specializing in Latin Dance and Ballroom Dance lessons. The moment she haded me the card I had a flash of recollection.
“Wait!” I said. “Didn’t you propose this idea as a topic in the Pro Action Cafe at Beyond the Basics?”
She thought for a minute and, with delight, realized that she had indeed! “That conversation changed my life,” she said.
Wow. I love that.
Later, I was talking with my friend Michelle Searle, who brought me to Queen’s, and she wondered how Nomusa had received the invitation to our event. The workshop was open, but the invitation was only sent out through Queen’s and to a few partners. I told Michelle that Nomusa is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Health Research Scientist. Michelle expressed delighted surprise because, although she didn’t know Dr. Mngoma in that capacity, apparently, Nomusa is famous in Kingston for leading free outdoor dance classes downtown in the summer!
Nine years from a template full of notes in a workshop to joy unleashed in a community and one happy and fulfilled human being.
